Game:

Head over Heels (1987)

Category:

Review

Duration: 1:14:46

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Huge playlist archive with AY / GFX improved games: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxOanVBhqd3t74YnYAJA9p4vMQYZYCJWX
INTRODUCTION (From the manual):
History Of The Blacktooth Empire: Far, far away from our star Sol lies the Blacktooth empire, an evil empire, four worlds enslaved by the planet Blacktooth. All of the slave worlds bubble with unrest, but due to the oppressive nature of their rulers they never reach boiling point, they all lack a leader to draw the masses of population together. Blacktooth itself is not any better, a world rigidly controlled by its dynastic leaders for so long that the populace do not even think about revolution. The peoples of the neighbouring stars are getting very worried about signs of military expansion from Blacktooth and have sent a spy from the planet Freedom to see if he can push the slave planets into full rebellion by finding the crowns lost when Blacktooth took over. The creatures of Freedom are very strange in that they are formed from a pair of symbolic animals that have adapted to operate either independantly or, to their mutual advantage, join together as one - Head saddled on Heels, and indeed these ARE their names and both are highly trained spies.

The Game: Head and Heels have been captured, separated and imprisoned in the castle headquaters of Blacktooth. Their cells contain 'keep fit' equipment, including a wall ladder that Head really must learn to climb. Your job is to get them both out of the castle and into the market place so they can join up again. From there, the journey leads to Moonbase Headquaters, where you will have to decide either to try to escape back to Freedom or to be a true hero and teleport to one of the slave planets to search for its lost crown! To overthrow the dictatorship on any of the slave planets would be a major blow to Blacktooth and you could return to Freedom in glory. Of course Blacktooth would probably enslave them again eventually but it would slow down any expansion plans for now. The populace of Blacktooth are so heavily oppressed that they would have to see all four of the slave planets revolt before the Blacktooth crown could cause an uprising. This of course would be the ultimate accolade, and unfortunately, almost certain suicide.

REVIEW:
You are controlling Head and Heels and as the game you have both been captured and have to escape from your cells and join together at the market place. You can switch between the characters whenever you like. Both have different abilities, Head descended from flying reptiles and can jump twice his own height and guide himself through the air. Heels is a powerful runner capable of leaping his own height. When you join them Head will be on top of Heels and you control them as one person – You can join them and separate them at any time.

While many of the isometric games had a lot of wandering around trying to find different things, Head over Heels is made more like an arcade game with lot of stuff to do and lots of action, and the concept with controlling two characters you can join together and control as one is very good. This game has more than 300 screens, and the graphics on every screen is very detailed.

Actually I’m not so impressed of the Spectrum version of this game, because while many of the first isometric games was exclusively for the Spectrum, this one is available in color for the Amstrad CPC, Atari ST and Amiga. For a monochrome game there is almost too much stuff on the screen. While you did not pay much attention to the use of monochrome graphics in Knight Lore and Gun Fright because of the use of grey scale and the simplicity of the graphics, and games like Quazatron, Nightshade and Strike Force Cobra was done in color …you can’t help but notice that all the stuff on the screens is the same color in this game, and because of this it can be hard to see the things you can pick up.

The controls are working fine both when you control one character or when they are joined together, but when you enter new rooms there is a lot of annoying places where a box will disappear as soon as you step / jump onto it, so you have to calculate for this to happen and jump again immediately. The game is on the limit for being too big, it is extremely difficult to find the right way through all these rooms, and some of the puzzles for entering new areas is very tough to figure out. The music and fx was nothing special for neither the 48k or 128k. Egorov Nikolai has made a version using the 48k beeper fx and added a new AY soundtrack that fits the game well.

The game was published by Ocean Software Ltd in 1987.

Rating:
Original 48/128k version: 82%
Unofficial 128k version: 86%

Original 48/128k tape: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/games/h/HeadOverHeels.tap.zip
Unofficial 128k tape: http://retrospec.sgn.net/users/tomcat/yu/ReCracks/HeadOverHeels_128_Remix.tap
Unofficial 128k Beta Disk / TR-dos: https://vtrd.in/gamez/h/HOH_UL.ZIP